I turn the page, hoping that this paragraph will be subsequently disproved. But no. Frans was actually planning to team up with a man who, two years earlier, he would have fought to the death. So much for an inner moral law.
Across from me, Herman slides back his chair. Coffee break. I close my book, follow him slowly to the foyer. Just hope he doesn’t ask anything. I have no desire to share my astonishment about Nazi spies and the “new defense” with Herman. It’s one thing to privately own up to one’s own misjudgment, but to share it is quite another. I would have to come up with another story, and I don’t know yet what that is, or should be. When we reach the coffee bar, I want to say I’m going to skip our break today, that I’m going straight home. But before I can get a word out, Herman smacks a stack of papers on the table.
“Eureka!”
“What?”
“I’ve found it. The connection, the line, the thread.”
I gingerly pick up the top sheet.
A list of names, Frans van Heemstra nearly at the bottom, and above him, Herman Witte.
“That’s me,” Herman says enthusiastically, “or I should say, that’s my father.”
I skim the rest of the names, try to figure out what it is I’m looking at. Again Herman beats me to the punch. “It’s a list of men who were held on remand in December 1946.”
“So … ?” I give Herman a questioning look, not yet certain how to phrase what I want to say.
“They were in the same cell block!”
Herman takes a minicarton of chocolate milk out of his breast pocket and stabs the straw triumphantly through the little foil dot. I look at him and back to the list. So my uneasiness when he asked about François recently was not unfounded. He has sucked Bommenneef into his father’s story, or vice versa. Whichever it is, he has appropriated Cousin Bomber. He will read the dossiers, will know everything I know and probably more, because he’s just better at looking for and finding things in this labyrinth than I am. I’ll no longer be able to decide what to share with him and what not to, I can no longer lie, no longer put things off till later. Now there is a witness: in every detective show on TV, that marks the beginning of the end.
I put the sheet back on the table. I can’t come up with anything better than: “I don’t want this.”
Herman looks at me, perplexed. “Do you know what this means? Our stories have coalesced.”
“Yes,” I say. “I know that, and I don’t want it.”
“But now I can help you,” he protests. He suddenly appears helpless, with his chocolate milk and his stupid stack of papers. My eyes cloud over, for a split second everything goes dark, and then a burning rage shoots from my toes up to the crown of my head. I want to hurl Herman’s papers through the room but catch myself just in time. So this is what they mean about hormonal mood swings. Breathe deeply. Count to ten. It doesn’t help. All the worries and frustrations of the past weeks are clenched in my chest. I don’t want yet more empty spaces and question marks on the map, or the chaos of Herman’s web that has no beginning and no end, or the craziness in my own head, or this indeterminate body that only grows and grows.
I snap at Herman that he mustn’t go grabbling around in my research as a distraction from his own fruitless quest, that the box of stuff about his father is just an excuse to stick his nose into a past he has nothing to do with. “I don’t have the time for this nonsense,” I say. Off to the left I see the barista take cover behind the bar.
I look at Herman’s two big, scared eyes.
“What are you just standing there for?”
My voice echoes through the foyer. The barista ducks down behind the counter, pretending to inspect the refrigerators. His head just sticks out above the countertop, as though he is in a battlefield trench. I turn back to Herman and poke a trembling finger into his chest. “You know what your problem is? You’re afraid you take after your father. You lure all these stories into your web, try to make everyone an accessory to your father’s crime, because you’re afraid of your genes, afraid that his betrayal and contempt for other people’s lives might have rubbed off on you. You’re scared to death that because you’ve got his blood you might make the same choices he did, that deep down, you’re a bad person.”
For a brief moment I see myself from a bird’s-eye perspective: a pregnant woman with swollen legs, standing in a gigantic foyer kicking up a ruckus about nothing—no, not about nothing, about keeping her story intact, about keeping Bommenneef alive, about not turning her hero over to some old pensioner who, with his little juice cartons and infantile smile, is trying to appropriate her family history.
I see my own stupefaction reflected in Herman’s face. I stop ranting, I see how he searches in vain for words, gathers up the papers, as though he’ll find something there in that long list of men whose glances might have crossed once on their way to or from their cell. Men who had nothing to do with one another except that history happened to plop them down in the same place at the same time, just like us now in this great big empty foyer.
Herman totters slightly, shifts from one foot to the other. I want to grab him by the shoulders, sit him down, and order him a coffee; I want him to go away and quit meddling with Bommenneef; I don’t know what I want. Behind me I hear the barista rummage in a cabinet. He puts on a CD to break this awful silence. The Buena Vista Social Club, that’ll do. I turn and march off. I try to put some anger into my gait, so that Herman doesn’t see how embarrassed I am. “Sorry,” I mumble as I head for the revolving door. “Sorry, sorry, sorry”—I keep mumbling it until I reach the station, until I’m on the train, until we start moving, “sorry, sorry,” so quietly that no one hears.
11 WEEKS LEFT
A WEEK HAS GONE by in silence. I lie on my bed and watch the treetops slowly turn red. My blood pressure has risen steadily since my last visit to the archive. I take pills and rest, I read and electrocute the mosquitoes that rose from the dead the day after the exterminator had eradicated them. I keep swelling up, faster now. The elastic in my socks digs into my ankles, my ring only fits my pinky now.
We drive to the hospital every other day. By now I know the routine of the blood pressure meter by heart: the crescendo of the hum, the rhythm of the beeps, first slower, then speeding up, until the final score appears on the little screen, followed by the nurse’s shaking head: still too high.
D leaves me behind every morning with orders not to move until he’s back from work. I ask him if his concern is for me or for the baby.
“I don’t think there’s a difference anymore,” he says.
Today he comes home early. “We have to celebrate reaching the magical milestone of the third trimester,” he’d said before leaving.
“That was last week,” I replied.
“All the more reason to celebrate,” he said with a laugh.
The chance that the baby will be born without too many defects grows by the day. As does the baby himself: the length of an eggplant, the weight of a thick wool sweater, say the websites. He can blink, cough, and dream (although what in God’s name a fetus has to dream about, nobody says). I click further to the next few weeks. Ear of corn, turnip, cauliflower, pumpkin. They warn for patches of pigment brought on by the hormones; the official term is “pregnancy mask”—what a terrific concept, being able to hide behind your pregnancy. The website’s weekly overview includes comments from mothers-to-be who complain of swelling, welts, cramps, and the baby’s kicking. “It’s domestic violence, pure and simple,” one woman writes. Another tells how the somersaults going on in her belly gave her two bruised ribs. Underneath, the mother of a two-year-old wrote, “It doesn’t end there. This morning my kid gave me a bloody nose. He wasn’t even angry, he was just flailing about.”
I think of Herman a lot. I’d like to phone him and apologize, but I don’t have his number. I imagine him sitting in the reading room, still nonplussed by my outburst. Who knows, maybe he and the barista gossip about me. What would they say? Hysterical. Hormon
al.
I lie in bed studying the pages I photographed from History of the Dutch Domestic Security Services. Nothing in the book indicates that the secret plans Bommenneef whispered about were anything more than the megalomaniac fantasies of men frustrated with their role in postwar Netherlands.
What does crop up is the diagnosis mentioned in Frans’s psychiatric report: “Resistance psychosis.”
There’s no official definition of the term anywhere, but it does appear in a book by Simon Vestdijk, Liberation Festival, written in 1949, which I found online. In it, one character, a Resistance hero, explains the basis for his psychosis: “the fear, and everything that went with it, at least meant we weren’t bored. We had a goal. Even those who were just afraid and otherwise didn’t do a blessed thing had a goal.”
I read the novel in a single afternoon. After the war, the hero in the book is terrified that he’ll die of boredom, so he plans two attacks, both of which fail. In the end he has no choice but to return, disillusioned, to everyday life.
Liberation Festival could have been Bommenneef’s story, except that with him, one of the attacks did succeed. It’s as though Frans, just like Vestdijk’s hero, was determined to keep the war going, cost what it may. Or, better put, to be forever ending it. But to accomplish that, the war had to carry on. Frans wouldn’t, or couldn’t, reconcile himself with a tedious peace.
I return to the online newspaper archive where I had earlier tracked down reports of the bombing and try to picture the peace in which Frans found himself. Alongside the articles about the bomb are items about the poor quality of hand soap, advertisements for nylon stockings, the announcement of the opening of a new theater in the north of the country, an ad for a brand-new board game called Reconstruction, the news that Dutch cyclists unanimously opted for a bike with extra-sturdy tires, and that the nostalgic ballad “Bloesem van Seringen” was the hit of 1947. There are some items I have to read twice before I understand what they’re getting at, because I recognize the words but not the context. “Nieuw Schoonbeek oil line opened.” “Northern round-trips begun.” “Flezkis to the East Indies.” And then there are the news items I had expected to be there but aren’t. Nothing about the Holocaust, nothing about concentration camp survivors, nothing about the extermination of the Jews, about confiscated property, or about the exhausted Dutch survivors of the Japanese internment camps. Nothing about the facts I learned to associate with those years. Hand soap. Nylon stockings. Theaters. A bombing.
For Frans, the wound had to stay fresh. He longed for the days when death nipped at his heels, when every cigarette or woman could be your last. Resistance psychosis.
I email three psychiatrist acquaintances about this syndrome. Not one of them has heard of it. They do agree that extreme stress factors can unhinge a person to the extent that it could trigger an existing susceptibility to psychosis, with the possibility of a genuine psychosis as a result. They also agree that there could be hundreds of other explanations for Frans’s behavior.
One of them suggests I study the profiles of the young terrorists who currently dominate our news headlines, and points to certain possible similarities: enmity against society, the feeling of not being taken seriously, and the lack of existential meaning, all of which can make one receptive to radical ideology.
I’m startled by that word: “terrorist.” I have never stopped to consider how that attack would be seen today. A bomb, three fatalities. Is it possible that our little family legend is equivalent to what nowadays makes us afraid to fly or congregate in crowded spaces? That the victims always get forgotten, even though the bombing was once front-page news? Is it possible that seventy years from now, a niece of one of today’s terrorists will get a standing ovation for her show-and-tell performance about her heroic uncle? Am I that niece?
I know there are a hundred other stories to choose from for my son. The one about his great-great-aunt who flew to Rhodesia in a tiny airplane in 1939 to help convert African women but ended up falling head over heels for a tribal chief and living with him in a hut for five years. Or the one about another distant uncle who died in his mistress’s bed and was smuggled out of the house by his two sons, and that they drove around for hours looking for a dignified place to leave his body. Or the story of my great-grandfather, who was executed by firing squad in Zutphen two months before liberation, and for whom there is a small white brick cross at a parking area along the IJssel River.
“If you want a hero, why not look into that story?” asked an uncle who wasn’t so keen on my obsession with twice-removed Bommenneef. I did not know how to reply, but now I do: because it’s too close. I know too many details of that story. And because of his closeness, my great-grandfather is too much person, not enough hero.
So many stories—but I wanted this one. Because of the ring, because of his last wish. But it was also a matter of proportion, of being just the right distance.
I follow the flock of starlings that dips and dives in a synchronized show in the evening light above our square. What was it that Herman said about those old school prints? The artist thought he was drawing history, but in the end, he was only drawing himself.
For the first time, I think of Bommenneef’s mother. Of the months she carried him in her belly in the summer of 1909. What did she expect of her son? That he would be better and smarter than she. That he would achieve the things she had left undone. That he would become a necessary new presence among everything that was already there, the crown on the creation, or at least a warm, cuddly body to embrace and, later, to lean on. A mother expects all sorts of things, but not that her child becomes a mass murderer.
“Knock knock, who’s there? It’s Adolf’s heartchen knocking,” wrote Wisława Szymborska in “Hitler’s First Photograph.” Little Adolf is a precious angel and mommy’s sunshine, a little fellow in his itty-bitty robe. Can you ever entertain the notion that with the birth of your child you multiply not life, but death? Perhaps that’s the only way to give the baby a fair chance. The only way not to saddle him with expectations he cannot achieve, to give him the right to exist, regardless of what that existence is. He might hurt, destroy, fail, maybe even murder. At the very least, you have to accept that as a possibility. Allowing death as well as life.
10 WEEKS LEFT
I BOLT AWAKE WITH an intense cramp in my left calf, a whiplash, a snakebite. In a panic I jiggle my leg back and forth, try to shake out the pain, but it only makes it worse. I knead and push with both hands. The muscles feel as hard as steel cables. The leg starts quivering as though possessed.
I jab D with my elbow. “Wake up,” I pant. “My leg. My leg!”
Slowly, D sits up, searches for my leg in the dark, clamps his big warm hand around my calf.
“Here?”
“Yes!”
He calmly massages the muscles. The quivering subsides, the pain recedes.
“Okay now?”
“Thanks.” But he doesn’t even hear me. I don’t know anyone who falls asleep as easily as D does. He closes his eyes and within seconds, he’s gone. Total abandon. I look at my phone. Four o’clock. I google “cramp + calf + pregnancy.”
It turns out to be yet another standard malaise. Abnormal circulation, mineral deficiency, too much or too little exercise. I can’t get back to sleep, which 24baby.nl says can be because of a hormonal disturbance, and according to mammanet.nl (which I still inevitably read as “mammoth net”) is due to the stress of a child being on the way. Maybe it’s just the mosquitoes. I swipe the electric racket around a bit, see the occasional flash, and at four thirty I decide to go downstairs and wait for the day to begin. It’s dead quiet outside, that strange in-between time when night becomes day. Above the rooftops it’s already getting light. Everything looks lonely this morning: the neighbors’ overloaded balconies, the empty birdhouses in the backyards, the motionless underwear on our washing rack. Even the baby hasn’t budged for hours. I am alone with things, in a world that is not ready to awaken.
The mail flap clatters. I walk downstairs, pick up the newspaper, and skim the front page. Terror alert. Influx of refugees. In the middle section, an obituary for a Resistance woman who died yesterday, a hundred years old. World War II seems to be getting a lot of attention these days. Maybe it’s my selective perspective, but I see that war everywhere, just like I now also see pregnant women all over the place.
Accompanying the article is a large picture of the Resistance woman, crooked as a corkscrew. She’s seated, wearing a bright-pink sweater, her hands packed in dark-blue wool mittens. According to the article, she was one of the few females in the Resistance and was part of a gang that after the war murdered an engineer from Leiden, assuming he had been a collaborator. He turned out to be innocent. The engineer, writes the obituary’s author, was one of the many victims of “similar misjudgments.” I wonder if Frans’s bomb victims are on this journalist’s list. Three of the many. It sounds so innocent: a bad call.
The murder tormented the woman all her life. She admitted to it at the age of ninety-six. The obituary recalls an interview that questions the reasoning behind the belated admission. Did she just want to clear her conscience? Or with death looming, was there fear of a last judgment, a gate, a God?
“Being close to death,” the woman replied, “puts you at your most honest, perhaps your only really honest moment. You’ve got nothing left to lose.”
Suddenly I know which moment in Frans’s life I would choose if I had Billy Pilgrim’s gift of time travel: his last day. The hours before his death in that beastly hot Spanish seaside resort, where he expired, sick and alone. I would drive him to the harbor, order calamari at a small outdoor café, and wait for him to talk. It’s exactly what this story needs. After all that’s been made up and kept back: an honest moment. An open space to which all the routes, side roads, and detours lead.
I look at my phone. Quarter after eight. Late enough to call, I reckon. I tap in B’s number. If anyone knows about Bommenneef’s last hours, it will be her.
In Search of a Name Page 10